


Boom Goes The Music Box

by Mthaelly



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: And the cast of Gotham, Angst, Character Study?, Cus god knows Batman and Joker have some serious mental issues, Denial of Feelings, M/M, The entire meal, This was incredibly fun and refreshing to write xD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:40:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26507620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mthaelly/pseuds/Mthaelly
Summary: With his hands around Joker’s neck and Joker’s gripping the knife buried in his side, people say this; Batman and Joker are fighting as they do, and always will. Then, one day his hand would hopefully squeeze hard enough or the knife would dig deep enough and it would end.Alfred, stitching up that wound after would say nothing, the resigned admission of an old man who knows the symptoms of denial. Selina, her sinuous body perched beside him would trace the wound with sharp eyes and think of cheesy rom-coms; longing stares and messy kisses. Frustrated, love-sick teenagers.Joker would say that they were dancing; that each scar was an art, a signature. He would cackle, cough and gurgle, the manic singsong voice of a psychopathic clown and Bruce punches him a kiss goodnight.
Relationships: Joker (DCU)/Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle & Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne
Kudos: 29





	Boom Goes The Music Box

**Author's Note:**

> I never once dared to write an introspective piece about Batjokes, because it was so complex, layered and so dipped full of meaning I thought my writing could never do it justice. And they were already so many great fics out there that cover this sort of thing abt the two of them.
> 
> But then I remembered this song, listened to it and got inspired and my hands slipped. Oops xD.
> 
> I do hope you will still enjoy it though! Thanks for reading!

_It wounds me, Batsy, that we can never see eye to eye. We’re so similar and yet different. I suppose that why I can’t blame you darling, but then again that’s exactly why I can._

He lunged at him before his gloved thumb could skim over the red button of the detonator. The tell-tale crunch of fists against bone followed, little dewdrops of blood spraying across the sickly skin like paint. The clown stumbles, laughs, giggles; gurgles in the blood building in his mouth and stabs him deep with a knife. Bruce grunts, tasting blood and socks him right in the jaw. That something in him purring at the crack that ensues, the crisp give of bone as the strength of his rage burrows into and breaks the clown’s face _that just wouldn't shut up._ Joker smiles, teeth coated in the red of his blood as it shines in Gotham’s musty moonlight with the dizzying glare of _promise_.

_C’mon baby, beat me, choke me, bruise and break me. Mark me so Jimmy ol’ boy and all his little horses will see!_

That beast in him breaks free, and he grabs Joker by the neck and slams him into the wall. The Glasgow grin on his face responding in kind to his inhuman snarl, hand tangled and pulling violently at green hairs as he slams it repeatedly into the wall. Joker never stops laughing, and his rage never stops building and Gotham’s nightly wind sings to their familiar . dance once again. Feels it crescendoing, the violins screeching and the choir screaming; the manic laughter of breaking piano keys and his fists the conductor driving the entire symphony to the end.

_The fat lady’s about to sing!_

The wall dents as Joker’s face meets it again, and Bruce can hear the strings snapping and breaking. The opera stage collapses, and Joker stops laughing as he slumps to the floor like a rag doll, bloodied, broken; _blissed_.

And Bruce, fists trembling violently from the rapidly decreasing high, feels _gloriously alive_.

  
  
  


* * *

He lives in a box full of bombs

Making catastrophe

A world of moving lines

There's not a lot of room for our love in his house

So we make it at mine

* * *

He drives Joker to Arkham later, the asylum guards already ready and waiting at the doors with a restraining trolley for the clown. Their eyes trail him with a numb weariness as he carries Joker through the doors, the villain’s long legs dangling over his arms as he carries him-bridal style. Sweeped off the floor like a virgin bride as they walked down the petal-covered aisle, into the black hearse adorned with flower wreaths at the front.

_Oh Batsy darling, you mean to tell me we’ve been married so many times? You sneaky, stinky rodent!_

Bruce carries him down the asylum halls, metal floors dirtied and rusted, straps him onto the trolley and watches as the asylum wards drag it to the intensive care unit. Then, he leaves in the Batmobile and back to the cave, where Alfred is waiting for him to help lick his wounds.

The bats scatter as he parks the car, and the wounds he sustained from the fight barely flaters his steps, their pain a soothing and sinful familiarity. The flashes of blood and violence that follows it moreso. He takes off the cowl, letting Alfred unhook the cape from his shoulders to be washed of the grime and filth of the night. The smell of alcohol-ly disinfectant greets him like an old friend, the great sting as it is applied by Alfred on his wound, a routine he ticks off his checklist. As is his surrogate father’s silence, as he sits on top of the surgical slab in the cave, the bat-computer just above, with blaring news reports of the night’s event.

He pretends to look at it, at the pretty curve of Vicki Vale’s pink-lipstick lips as she stands in front of the camera and the burning bank, speaking over the hails of police sirens and ambulances that are coming to and leaving the scene. His eyes drift, up the screen to the roof of the burning building; another collapsed opera stage, where grotesque, inhuman lips painted blood-red laughed in tune with his conducting fists, a wanton psycho-high ode.

He swallows, just barely. The movement of his Adam's apple is scarce discernible, but Alfred can see it as clear as day. Bruce, however, continues looking at the screen, as if his mind isn't shrivelling and crying for the high, the rush of manic movement and rage-induced coming togethers’ of fists and blood of the rooftop, alleyways, chapels, chemical factories, orphanages and every nook and cranny in Gotham. The heady craze of a man that takes his violence like he takes in oxygen to breathe, and gives it back ten,hundred-fold in kind because _I know how much you love it darling._

Alfred puts in the last stitch, methodically putting away the medical supplies. Bruce still hasn’t spoken a word, eyes glued to the screen suspended above the both of them. It sickens him a little, that the sight of the burning bank disturb him close to none now, that nights in Gotham are like a slice of hell served onto the mortal plane. Screaming of the damned and sight of the dead everything in between.

Bruce, who in the news clip is chasing after Gotham’s nightmare incarnate, the grimace on his lips set so stone-hard that he might as well have grinned along with that psychopath, stop playing pretend. He wonders if Bruce knows, or if anyone in this city-still sane, still holding on-can see as well.

Alfred leaves, as silent as he was from the beginning.

  
  


* * *

And when he comes, his heart beat stops

Before he leaves, he plants explosives in my music box

* * *

  
  


Selina, once- _oh how naive she had been_ -had thought she had broken through and knew Bruce from the inside out.

It had started out as a challenge really, coming through to the indomitable Batman and sneaking past his thick guarded walls like breaking into safes to his damaged little heart. In the dark of one rainy night, she had peeled down the cowl in the shadow of Gotham's poorer districts. Those blue eyes had looked at her with a gleam of warmth, of shared understanding. Two battered souls who shared a kinship; experience of early pain and loss as he touched his lips to hers in the cold rain.

Perhaps it was warmth that clouded his gaze in the shroud of night, or it was the light of the flickering street lamp behind them that caused the lighting in his eyes. Perhaps it was the drowsy lure of love that made his eyes close when they kissed, or it was something closer to the build-up years of flip-flopping denial and forced hope that set the clench of his jaw and the stone-cold press of his freezing lips; he had felt colder than the acidic rain.

She saw that hope in Alfred’s old eyes, addressing her as “Miss Kyle” and eyes shifting towards Bruce. He was almost pleading. Bruce, she would realize later on, was begging himself.

_Like the drippity-drop of pearls onto blood-soaked pavement, some things are too entrenched, too permanent and too gross to hope away._

She thinks that how the clown would have described it. ‘Drippity-drop’ seems to be in his cadence, she could almost imagine the rough-smooth drawl of his acid-eaten mouth making the sounds of that word, like reciting some really, really bad poetry. Then, he would laugh that bone-chilling laugh _-it depends who was on the receiving end really, an equally deranged person might’ve call it lively, Selina just found it annoying-_ because murder and psychopatic trauma was the clown’s MO and if you haven’t noticed, everything’s _funny_ when your an insane killer clown.

Bruce would punch him, blood spewing across the dirty floor like graffiti and strangle him and do it again. Their hands would scratch, scar, grapple and claw, all the nuances of a violent beatdown and of people who enjoyed it, needed it more than any person should. Sane ones, at least. The marks of the clown’s nails and knife would mark his body like freckles; meaningless in it’s random violence or entirely meaningful if you want to look into it. She’s pretty sure Bruce doesn’t want to. 

Laying beside him, she looks at them and thinks of drug-addled teens; too prideful to refuse the offer, too addicted to give it up after.

  
  


* * *

I thought I could finger paint a liquid future

A raindrop shot in the dark

* * *

  
  
  


Batman was as much a part of Gotham as crime was. _The clown, Gothamites would tell you, made up a lot of that part._

Gotham was like nowhere else; it’s gothic buildings and dilapidated gargoyles almost feels like a perfect set up for bat-dressing vigilantes and killer clowns to play hookey in. And like a classic Gothic horror, there were proper beasts and monsters. Panic-inducing toxins, half-scarred mob bosses and hulking drug-enhanced men who don’t account as human anymore. If one wanted to find the Gates Of Hell, look not further than Gotham. It would make a pretty accurate tourism slogan.

People who live here- _ordinary people_ mind you, and one can debate all they like if Gothamites were exactly ordinary people, because ordinary people don’t live in fear of killer crocodiles and mad hatters-can do as much about the Bat as they could about the thriving crime-nightlife of the city. The cops, with their ordinary blue uniforms and frail bullets, can do as much for the city as much as Arkham does to rehabilitate the city’s criminals. The people of Gotham are all but spectators to the nightly symphonies of wailing sirens and banks and dynamite going _boom_.

There are recurring players in this dance. Characters that could be born nowhere else than in the dank, musty and rotten cradle of Gotham. The Bat seems like an extension of the city’s gargoyles and buildings itself, stoic and unmovable. A creature of the night that stalks and dishes out vengeance like full-course meals at a restaurant _-and mind you, there were many hungry, hungry customers._

The clown; the Joker who's green hair matches the toxic green of the city’s chemicals. And like those abandoned plants and factories, no one knows what to do with him. Releasing them into the outside would unleash Gotham-like hell unto the rest of the unsuspecting world, and keeping them poisons the soil and rain. But then again, the city feeds off the toxicity and if you can’t stand the acidity of the air or the nightly excitement, you should really move your ass out because that’s not even the first course in Gotham’s palette.

They don’t really know what to do with each other either, people would tell you. They will tell you however-the hostages, the cops, the asylum wards- that when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, the result is bloody fists and manic laughter, burning buildings and ambulances, gut-covered pavements and disemboweled bodies. _And why won't you just kill him? Either of you? Both of you._

The Bat carrying a defeated Joker in his arms, like cradling. Never giving him over the cops, strapping him to his overpowered vehicle and sending back to Arkham himself. The guards would say he places the lanky body on the restraining chair gently, hands lingering just a second too long on freshly bleeding skin with protruding bones, eyes watching with a sheen of what could say was exasperated fondness. _We’re crazy, all of us are. But we’ve seen the Bat and the Clown so many times, it’s like a mother watching her child and knowing he's hungry just from that certain frown of his lips. We just know, and it’s insane._

_The clown’s something more than insane, the Bat well, if he agrees to see one of our therapists maybe they will tell you. Or maybe they’ll just hand you a copy of the Joker’s file._

  
  


* * *

But I've got a lot of secrets to file in a thriving pile

Of what is breaking my heart

Slowly I'll walk away from the crime scene

* * *

With his hands around Joker’s neck and Joker’s gripping the knife buried in his side, people say this; Batman and Joker are fighting as they do, and always will. Then, one day his hand would hopefully squeeze hard enough or the knife would dig deep enough and it would end. 

Alfred, stitching up that wound after would say nothing, the resigned admission of an old man who knows the symptoms of denial. Selina, her sinuous body perched beside him would trace the wound with sharp eyes and think of cheesy rom-coms; longing stares and messy kisses. Frustrated, love-sick teenagers.

_Joker would say that they were dancing; that each scar was an art, a signature. He would cackle, cough and gurgle, the manic singsong voice of a psychopathic clown and Bruce punches him a kiss goodnight in kind._

  
  


* * *

And soon my flesh will return from bright green

Back to a primary color

I'll bury the pigment of the accidental bedroom I love you

'Till I become a paler shade with a hand grenade

That I'm throwing back at you

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Boom Goes The Music Box by Emily Rose


End file.
